The Texarkana Moonlight Murders: The Unsolved Case of the 1946 Phantom Killer

by Michael Newton

  In terms of suspects, Heiskell wrote, the Phantom “could be a man of almost any age; it has not been determined whether he is white or a Negro; it is generally agreed that he is a resident—and an apparently respectable one—of Texarkana.”65

  On May 18 the grapevine crackled once again, with rumors that the Phantom Killer had been run to ground. Sunday’s edition of the Texarkana Gazette explained:

  The Gazette and News office was besieged with telephone calls, both local and long distance, all day and most of the night Saturday from persons in this region who had heard various tales about the apprehension of the murderer.

  Some persons were convinced that the murderer had been in custody for the past week, and others thought that he had been apprehended only Saturday. Tales varied as to where he was being held. It was “reliably” reported by residents who were sure they were correct that he was in the Bowie County jail, which, they said, was surrounded by Texas Rangers with submachine guns on their knees. Others believed one Ranger had put the killer in the Ranger’s two-place airplane and flown him to an out-of-town jail.

  Sheriff Presley branded all of these stories untrue.66

  And while some accused Texas Rangers of hiding the Phantom, others chafed at their inability to close the case. One anonymous critic, well into his cups, found rangers gathered in a Texarkana café late one evening in May. Gawking at the assemblage of lawmen, he crowed, “Ten thousand dollars worth of cowboy boots and big, white hats—and fifteen cents worth of brains!”67

  Lone Wolf Gonzaullas, as we noted earlier, became a focal point of that frustration with the law’s failure to bring the Phantom in, dead or alive. Reporter Homer “Wick” Fowler, writing for the Dallas Morning News, interviewed Gonzaullas at the height of the panic, asking, “Wolf, what kind of fellow do you think the Phantom is?” Gonzaullas answered, “Well, I don’t know, Wick, but he’s a darn sight smarter than I am.” To which Fowler replied, “Now, Wolf, you don’t think I came all the way from Dallas to find that out.”68

  Tension spiked again on Saturday, May 25, as the mythical three-week deadline came and went without another double shooting. Somehow, garbled newspaper accounts had managed to impose a rigid cycle on the Phantom Killer’s crimes, even among Texarkansans who should have known better. Police, preoccupied with searching for the gunman, spent no time trying to set the record straight.69

  Texarkana native and Phantom researcher Wayne Beck, a three-year-old in 1946, later maintained for several years a fascinating and informative Web site on the Phantom case, now sadly defunct. As he described the manhunt to author Joseph Geringer in 2001, “The Texas Rangers were in contact with every law enforcement agency in the country where someone attacked people parking and either killed them or committed rape. Surprisingly, there were many such incidences, even as far away as Wisconsin and New York. They checked out virtually everyone who was arrested for rape or robbery in Texas where the modus operandi was similar to the Texarkana crimes. There were several very good leads, local people, but the Rangers would go no further with them if their fingerprints didn’t match.” One suspect, never publicly identified, was a forty-two-year-old resident of College Station, Texas, 236 miles southwest of Texarkana, who owned a .22-caliber weapon and “was known to enjoy sneaking up on parked lovers with his rifle.” According to Beck, investigators thought he was in Texarkana “during the Phantom season,” but they could not prove their case. Another prospect, Beck says, was a graduate student from the University of Texas in Austin, discharged from the U.S. Navy after he “displayed homosexual/homicidal tendencies.”70

  In passing, we should note that while the unnamed navy reject’s homicidal tendencies might cast him as a suspect, homosexuality almost definitively barred him from contention as the Phantom Killer. Sexually motivated serial slayers are nearly unanimous in targeting their objects of desire—i.e., “straight” killers prey on members of the opposite sex, while homosexual murderers seek out same-sex victims. That pattern is rarely broken, except by serial-killing pedophiles, who may claim victims of both sexes, and by even more unusual specimens such as Florida’s Ottis Elwood Toole. A killer from age fourteen by his own account, Toole committed various murders of men and women on his own, and for a period of years with traveling partner Henry Lee Lucas. Convicted of six murders and generally acknowledged today as the slayer of six-year-old Adam Walsh in 1981, Toole also expressed his aberrant sexuality through arson and cannibalism.71

  Texarkana’s panic was, at least to some extent, a media event. No other manhunt since the search for London’s “Jack the Ripper,” back in 1888, had generated such publicity around the world—and that case, too, was destined to remain officially unsolved. The next such reign of terror by a prowling psychopath would come three decades later, in New York City, during the depredations of a gunman who announced himself in letters to newspapers as “a monster” and “the Son of Sam.” That case was solved, albeit by fortuitous coincidence, but lawmen searching for the Phantom caught no breaks.

  J. Q. Mahaffey later admitted playing the Phantom’s story “for all it was worth,” but he began to have second thoughts while the hunt for the killer was still in progress. While attending that year’s conference of Associated Press Managing Editors (now Associated Press Media Editors), Mahaffey met the managing editor of Rhode Island’s Providence Journal. Noting Mahaffey’s name tag, the other newsman quipped, “Oh, Texarkana. One of the survivors?”72

  Mahaffey got the point and later told the Arkansas Gazette, “After I finally got some sense about the story, I was concerned that it would do my town great harm, and it did.” Still, there was money to be made. And as Mahaffey noted, “That’s what made newspaper work in this town the most fascinating thing in the world.”73

  Fascinated or not, Mahaffey himself was not immune to the fear. Twenty-five years later, he admitted, “The story so unnerved me that I was not able to sleep at night, and people were so frightened in town here that they would congregate in the early evening, feeling there was safety in numbers.”74

  One ironic beneficiary of the Phantom’s madness was minor league baseball—more specifically, the Texarkana Bears, an East Texas League farm club of the Chicago White Sox. A quarter century after leaving his post as the Texarkana Gazette’s sports editor, Louis Graves told his old hometown paper:

  I remember the deep fear upon the community. Doors were bolted, windows were barred, and many a resident slept with loaded weapons by the bedside. Social visiting was limited at night, unless an advance telephone call was made so that there would be no mistaken incidents.

  It seems that the desire to be with people was best satisfied at night by going out to the baseball park. Fear of the Phantom drove many groups out to the game and as a consequence the Bears of that [team owner] Dick Burnett era played to big packed houses. Too, interest in a ball club loaded with such talent as Vernon “General Gawge” Washington, Hal Simpson, Vallie Eaves, Jinx Poindexter, Bill McCullough, and others perhaps put an all time high through the turnstiles. Once the game was over, people seemed reluctant to go their individual ways.75

  The Bears—last seen on field in 1940, as the Texarkana Twins—went on to face the Henderson Oilers for the East Texas League Championship in 1946, losing out by a margin of four games to two.76 By then, unknown to locals rooting for their home team, the Phantom Killer had already called his game and was retiring undefeated.

  Chapter 8

  Prime Suspect?

  Life magazine’s weekly issue of June 10, 1946, carried a two-page article under the headline “Texarkana Terror,” with photographs suggesting a town under siege. A state senator’s daughter was shown leaving home with her children, bound for a hotel while her husband traveled on business. Edward McGill and his wife read newspapers behind closed blinds, a shotgun propped against a nearby wall. At Henry Rochelle’s home, blankets draped windows, while pots and pans were strung to doorknobs as makeshift alarms. Outdoor lights blazed after sundown, while waitresses stood id
le in an empty steakhouse. Theaters could hardly sell a ticket for their showings of The Haunted Mine, Midnight Manhunt, and The Phantom Speaks.1

  Texarkana’s citizens had supped their fill of horror. What they needed was a break—and Arkansas State Policeman Max Andrew Tackett thought he might have caught one.

  At age thirty-three, barely a year out of military uniform, Tackett regarded himself as a minor pawn in the Phantom manhunt. “I was one of the littlest policemen there,” he later told the Texarkana Gazette. “I was still a rookie with a little bit of experience. Not one of my ideas was accepted.”2 But he definitely had ideas—and he was brooding over his apparent near-miss with the Phantom on May 3.

  Tackett’s brainstorm—which, he later claimed, had cracked the Phantom’s case—has been described in somewhat contradictory accounts. Speaking to Carlton Stowers in 2001, Tillman Johnson said, “Max Tackett picked up on the fact that every time the Phantom struck, a car had been stolen, then later abandoned. In fact, on the night Betty Jo Booker was killed, a car was stolen from a friend of her parents, and a witness had come forward with the name of the man who drove it away.”3

  Thirty years earlier, speaking for himself to James Presley, Tackett said, “It had come to my attention that on every night of these assaults and murders, a car was stolen on each night here in Texarkana, and the car that had been previously stolen had been abandoned at the scene [of the subsequent theft]. It occurred to me that the man who had stolen the car had used it to leave town, and had returned for some unexplained reason. Around this time the state police received a complaint against a man on a relatively minor matter. We were given the man’s car license number. The car had been stolen here in Texarkana and it was still operating under the same license number.”4

  What car? Blair Case, writing in 1977 from an interview with Tillman Johnson, says the vehicle belonged to Wayne O’Donald of Texarkana, and had been stolen outside Texarkana Hospital on the night of March 24—that is, around the same time as the Griffin-Moore slayings.5 If accurate, that seems to contradict the trend described elsewhere by Johnson and Tackett, under which a car stolen on March 24 should have been abandoned on or about April 13–14. No surviving account contains any specific mention or description of cars stolen concurrently with the Griffin-Moore murders, the Starks raid, or the February attack on victims Hollis and Larey.

  What happened next is typically confused. In 1971, Tackett said, “I worked very close with Milton Mosier, the state identification man at Hope [Arkansas] at this time. We were not successful in finding the man, but we found the car parked on a parking lot on information furnished by a five year old child.”6 Johnson’s version, six years later, stated simply that “police found the car abandoned on a parking lot on June 28, 1946, and a stake-out resulted in the arrest of a 21-year-old woman.”7

  At the risk of quibbling, it is doubtful that a suspect would return to an abandoned car—and, once again, the June date wreaks havoc with claims of other cars stolen and dumped in conjunction with successive murders. In any case, a female suspect was arrested on June 28, eight weeks after the Starks attack.

  The lady in question was Peggy Lois Swinney, née Stevens, born at Breckenridge, Texas, in Stephens County. Case cites her age as twenty-one; the 1930 U.S. Census says that she was born in 1926, while other sources peg the year as 1925. She was one of nine children born to Henry Lee Stevens and Jenny Myrtle (Campbell) Stevens.8 Her surname was a spanking-new addition: on the very day of her arrest in Texarkana, Peggy had married Youell Lee Swinney in Shreveport, Louisiana, sixty-eight miles south of Texarkana.9

  So much for honeymoons.

  Years later, in private conversation, Tillman Johnson told Glenn Ferguson that Peggy was a prostitute, working at a Texarkana brothel, when she “took up” with Swinney on some unknown date.10 Author John Sanchez further describes Peggy as a convicted felon prior to her June 28 arrest, but no record of her incarceration survives today in Texas, Arkansas, or Louisiana.11 Peggy herself told police that she met Swinney while she was in jail, when he came to visit some other female inmate. She liked his looks and flirted with him briefly, then moved in with him upon her release until, she said, “me and him had a fuss.”12

  A week after their breakup, Peggy claimed, friends alerted her that Swinney was looking for her, armed with a .32-caliber pistol. He found her with another man, at Texarkana’s Busy Bee Café, and assaulted her date. “He meant to have me,” Peggy said, “even if he had to kill someone to do it.” Impressed with his ardor, Peggy left the restaurant with Swinney, embarking on a cross-country spree of “stealing cars and picking up hitchhikers.” Speculation persists that some of those hitchers may have been robbed and murdered, but authorities could never cite specific cases.13

  Peggy’s groom was not in Texarkana at the time of her arrest, but Blair Case reports that “police knew him.”14

  * * *

  And well they should have. Youell Swinney was the fifth child of hell-fire Baptist minister Stanley C. Swinney and Myrtle Looney, both born in 1888. Stanley was a native Arkansan, while Myrtle hailed from Georgia. They married on May 4, 1907, in Nevada County, Arkansas. Youell was preceded by four siblings: brother Cleo in 1909, sister Mildred in 1911, brother Spurgeon in 1913, and sister Marie in 1915.15 Youell’s birth date remains a matter of debate: the 1920 U.S. Census listed him as two years old (with his name misspelled “Youll”); Arkansas State Penitentiary records peg the date as February 9, 1917; while the Social Security Death Index places the happy event one month later, on March 9.16

  Despite his sect’s opinion on the sanctity of marriage, Stanley and Myrtle divorced in Miller County, Arkansas, on November 6, 1926. The county clerk recorded their last name as “Swiney,” but Stanley did not quibble. He remarried prior to 1930’s census (to bride Bessie), later moving to Missouri. Myrtle remained in Texarkana, marrying John Rudolph Travis, two years her senior, on August 28, 1930. Sometime during that same year, Youell logged his first arrest in Pine Bluff, for burglary and grand larceny. His FBI rap sheet describes the disposition of that case as “indef[inite].”17 Presumably, since he was just thirteen, he was released after a scolding to his mother and stepfather.

  On February 19, 1932, police in Texarkana, Arkansas, jailed Swinney on identical charges of burglary and grand larceny. Again, no disposition of the case was listed on his record, indicating further lenient treatment of the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old.18

  Youell avoided any further trouble for the next three years, then was arrested in Texarkana on January 4, 1935, for possessing and attempting to pass counterfeit nickels. Free on bond from that charge, he was detained for “investigation” in San Antonio, Texas, on April 3, 1935, then released without charges. On July 24, 1935, Texarkana police caught Youell with more counterfeit coins—half-dollars, this time—and referred his case to the U.S. Secret Service. Lodged in the Lamar County jail at Paris, Texas, on July 28, he subsequently faced trial on federal counterfeiting charges at Fort Smith, Arkansas. Conviction on September 26, 1935, earned him a two-year sentence at the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution in El Reno, Oklahoma.19

  While Youell was locked up at El Reno, his mother—divorced from John Travis on some unknown date—married her third husband, James Henry Tackett, in Texarkana on March 28, 1936. Although it had no relevance to either member of the happy couple at the time, James was a distant cousin of future state trooper Max Tackett, who would find himself pursuing Youell Swinney ten years down the road, during the Phantom’s reign of terror.20

  Paroled from El Reno on July 8, 1937, Swinney enjoyed eleven days of freedom before police in Shreveport, Louisiana, nabbed him on another counterfeiting charge, on July 19. Violation of parole, plus the new offense, sent him to the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, for another three-year term. Authorities paroled him once again, on July 21, 1940, but Youell still had not learned his lesson. He missed an appointment with his Shreveport parole officer on November 5, 1940, fleeing to Texarkana,
where he stole a Chevrolet coupe from a Dr. Burnett on December 29. The U.S. Bureau of Parole issued a warrant for Swinney’s arrest on February 6, 1941, by which time he was already in custody, at Texarkana.21

  The feds were pleased to let Arkansas prosecutors have first crack at Swinney. On February 11, 1941, Youell pled guilty to auto theft in Miller County, receiving a three-year sentence. On February 19, he arrived at the Cummins State Farm, a rural prison outside Gould, Arkansas, where officials listed his occupation at “typist and file clerk,” noted his “ruddy” complexion, and logged a half-inch scar on the bridge of his nose.22

  * * *

  The prison farms of Arkansas have a long and sordid history. In 1838, Governor James Conway signed legislation establishing the state’s first penitentiary, built during 1839–40 on a ninety-two-acre tract in Little Rock. From 1849 to 1913, the state leased convicts out to private individuals as virtual slave labor, in a system popular throughout the South and rife with physical abuse. In 1899, new legislation moved the penitentiary—popularly called “The Walls”—to a fifteen-acre site southwest of Little Rock, ceding its former structure to the present-day State Capitol. Three years later, Governor Jefferson Davis convinced state legislators to allocate $140,000 for purchase of 10,000 acres for creation of a rural prison farm. He hoped to buy the acreage from a political crony in Jefferson County, but lawmakers preferred the former Cummins and Maple Grove plantations in Lincoln County. In a fit of pique, Governor Davis waged a losing fight to scuttle his own proposed project, but construction went ahead without his blessing, and inmates began occupying the Cummins State Farm in December 1902. In 1913, Arkansas established a permanent execution chamber at The Walls. Three years later, a second rural facility—the Tucker State Farm—was established in Jefferson County. Governor Junius Futrell closed The Walls in 1933, moving the state’s electric chair to Tucker, while the defunct prison’s inmates were divided between the two farms.23